Do the Americans even know what they want out of NAFTA?

The best thing to be said about the last four days of the NAFTA talks in Ottawa is also the only thing you can say about them for certain: Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted about them yet.

He’s been too busy insulting pro football players. Last Friday, he told an audience at a rally in Alabama that the NFL should fire any “son of a bitch” who does not stand during the U.S. national anthem. Over the weekend, he un-invited the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the traditional White House reception because their star Stephen Curry expressed reservations about visiting the current occupant.

By NFL Game Day on Sunday, Trump’s disgustingly divisive display had become the biggest story in America. Players, management and owners stood arm-in-arm or took a knee on the sidelines. Three teams stayed in their locker rooms or stadium tunnels during the Star Spangled Banner. On NBC Sunday Night Football — the top-rated prime time show in the U.S. — the anchors and commentators spent the first 20 minutes of the broadcast unanimously taking Trump down for his incendiary comments. No longer was it about Colin Kaepernick and white cops assaulting blacks, which is how this controversy started a year ago. Suddenly, it was about freedom of speech — a constitutional right.

Trump has been tweeting about football ever since Friday — as if he didn’t have a country to run. Roughly 3.5 million Americans have seen their lives shattered by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, North Korea is rattling its nuclear sabre and another Republican Senate health bill to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is circling the drain. So yeah, let’s talk about football.

Tweeting on NAFTA seems to be pretty far down the list of priorities for @realDonaldTrump, which is just as well. When Trump talked about terminating NAFTA last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there was “nothing new” in his threat. Trudeau knows better than to engage on social media with the president on something this vital to Canadian interests.

So does the architect of free trade in Canada, Brian Mulroney. He agrees with Trudeau’s low-key approach to the White House on the trade file. “The worst thing Canadians could do,” he said in a recent Q&A with Policy magazine, “would be to respond to a tweet or get into a verbal fight with the Americans over something that is meaningless.

Which is where Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland was coming from in a media availability Monday afternoon, during which she was cheerfully careful to say absolutely nothing meaningful or informative.

“This is a very accelerated process,” she said in the foyer of the House after question period. “Solid progress” has been made on “bread and butter trade issues” such as “electronic forms and harmonizing regulations” at the border, she added. But that’s electronic paperwork for a smarter border — something all sides can agree on. Low-hanging fruit.

Trade talks don’t address deal-breakers up front. They save them for the end of negotiations. These talks are supposed to conclude by year’s end, ahead of the U.S. mid-term primaries over the winter and spring and the Mexican presidential and parliamentary elections next July 1.

Wilbur Ross knows the auto industry well, of course. When he owned a parts supplier, the company closed an Ohio factory that made floor mats … and moved the jobs to Mexico.

But while the Americans want a deal-or-no-deal decision by year’s end, they’ve yet to put up language on their own two major re-openers — rules-of-origin and the dispute settlement mechanism. Freeland put it quite diplomatically: “We haven’t yet received proposals from the U.S. on some of these more contentious issues. But Canada is ready.”

The problem with the U.S. ask on rules-of-origin is the automotive sector. NAFTA requires 62.5 per cent North American content for automobiles. Trump wants a higher percentage — rather, a higher American percentage. Think Pennsylvania and steel. Think Michigan and Ohio and auto plants. These three swing states delivered the White House to Trump.

The problem for the Americans is in the numbers. A Scotiabank Economics piece last week put it succinctly: “Roughly 75 per cent of the value of all the auto parts used in North American-built vehicles is sourced within NAFTA, well above the 62.5 per cent threshold required for finished automobiles to move duty-free between NAFTA countries.

“In the U.S., NAFTA has enabled the auto industry to outperform other industrial sectors, which has pushed its share of overall U.S. manufacturing to new highs. The auto sector now accounts for a record 12.4 per cent of total U.S. manufacturing activity, up from less than an estimated 10 per cent prior to the introduction of NAFTA.”

As for Canada-U.S. auto trade, the industry Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association of Canada estimates “there is between 60 and 70 per cent U.S. content in Canadian assembled vehicles,” the Globe and Mail reports.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, of course, has different numbers. In a widely-shared Washington Post op-ed last week, he wrote, “If we don’t fix the rules of origin, negotiations on the rest of the agreement will fail to meaningfully shift the trade imbalance.”

Ross knows the auto industry well, of course. When he owned a parts supplier called the International Auto Components Group, the company closed an Ohio factory that made floor mats … and moved the jobs to Mexico.

Reducing their merchandise trade deficit is the Americans’ number one priority, but their issue isn’t with Canada. With us, they have a $12 billion surplus when trade in services is included. With China, they have a merchandise deficit of nearly $350 billion.

Nor have the Americans as yet offered language on replacing the independent dispute settlement mechanism in Chapter 19 of NAFTA. The need for autonomous tribunals is a deal-breaker for Canada now, just as it was in the original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1987.

On government procurement, including state and provincial levels, Team Trump wants more access to Canadian markets but isn’t offering to more access to the U.S. Sorry, Mr. President, it isn’t reciprocity unless it goes both ways. Canadian engineering and concrete firms can help Trump with his planned $1 trillion infrastructure program to repair and replace aging roads, bridges and airports. Trump is talking about leveraging public money through private investment, along the lines of the new Canada Infrastructure Bank.

As Freeland noted, there are 28 sectoral tables down at the Diefenbaker Building this week, which is a lot to keep track of. On Tuesday night, she was hosting her American and Mexican colleagues for dinner at the renovated National Arts Centre. She planned to use the venue as a symbolic reminder that the exemption for cultural industries is a must-keep for Canada.

As it happens, U.S, Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was a deputy USTR during Ronald Reagan’s first term. Freeland could remind him that Mulroney persuaded Reagan — a former president of the Screen Actors Guild — to give Canada the cultural exemption in the first FTA.

Here’s how Mulroney recalls making the argument to Reagan at the time: “How do we compete with this giant coming at us daily over the airwaves, the newspapers, the media and the movies? And so, we need an exclusion that will help us develop our industry, both English-speaking and French-speaking. Both of which are small, relative to you, and fragile, very fragile. So I’ve got to have this exemption for them.”

“Let me think about it,” Reagan replied. Which is how it got done.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.